For years, open rates were the gold standard of what metrics counted in email marketing. However, basing an email campaign’s success off open rates provides a narrow picture of subscriber engagement and action or lack thereof. Subscribers do more than open emails they engage. They click through to links, products, and actual purchases. They reply. They take time to process the information within the email. When email marketers move beyond open rates to these more meaningful, more engaged increments of measurement, they can more appropriately adjust email targeting, engage on much deeper levels, and exponentially increase successful marketing efforts.
Why Open Rates ARE NOT Enough
Open rates are a faulty way of measuring engagement. With the increase in privacy protections, many email software systems are disabling open tracking, making this once fail-proof, easily quantifiable way to measure success nearly impossible. Furthermore, an email can register as “opened” without the intended subscriber actually opening it, giving the marketer a false sense of success. Email Warm-Up Strategies can help ensure that emails are more likely to land in the primary inbox, making real engagement metrics like clicking, replying, and conversion more reliable. Instead, to understand true subscriber activity, marketers have to rely upon elements that show active, intentional engagement clicking, replying, conversion, etc.
Key Real Engagement Metrics Marketers Should Measure
Real engagement is more than just opening an email. Things that marketers should welcome measuring include click-through rate (CTR), bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, and average time reading the email. These metrics help give insight into how engaged those who really want the email are operating and provide information on why, how, what they like, and how they feel, all of which helps with future content creation and targeting.
Click-Through Rates Help Determine What Subscribers Want
The good thing about measurement is that it helps marketers get in line with what subscribers REALLY want, what’s appealing to them and relevant. This is ONLY measured by clicks as clicking shows intention and interest as opposed to an open, which can be misconstrued. A marketer can assess where a subscriber clicked after receiving an email and find out that the topic XYZ was of interest. This can help them segment their audience and appropriately craft future campaigns for that smaller segmented audience who already engaged in that fashion. This creates further interest, more engagement, and ultimately, conversion.
Conversion Rates: Measuring Real Success
In terms of measuring real success, it seems there’s no better measure than conversion rates. Conversion rates are based on baseline subscriber behavior that translates into some sort of action taken, directly via email communication. Should a campaign have a high conversion rate, it means the messaging is effective in relation to the subscriber’s intent at that time. This also enables marketers to follow up and remarket to those who converted in the past or those with similar behavioral intentions to convert, extending everyday efforts and ROI.
Time Spent Reading as a Measure of Engagement
Whenever a subscriber opens an email or clicks through to an article or designated website piece, there are metrics measuring how long they engage with that content. If subscribers are spending an inordinate amount of time on certain emails or certain articles, it means that content is relevant and they enjoy the experience. Marketers can segment their subscriber list based on those people who demonstrated this behavior previously, which means that any future products or services marketers would want to provide should be similar to what was previously comfortable for these people. This fosters engagement, trust, and better personalization along the customer journey.
Using Engagement Trends to Improve Unsubscribe and Bounce Rates
There are two major rates that a marketer should pay attention to see how successful they’ve been in engaging people and keeping subscribers: unsubscribe rate and bounce rate. A high unsubscribe rate means that a marketer did something wrong or sent information that was not relevant or timely enough for proper consumption. A bounce rate could mean that the information isn’t sent properly (if it’s undeliverable it gets “bouncing” back) or that poor list hygiene exists enough that engagement trends cannot be determined. Therefore, by being sensitive to these engagement statistics, a marketer can try to course correct as quickly as possible to avoid more unsubscribes or more poor engagement trends down the line.
Greater Subscriber Engagement and Response Rates
Marketers who ask for subscriber replies, whether through surveys, polls, feedback, or even casual replies, are guaranteed greater engagement and valuable feedback on what their subscribers need. The types of emails that request a response are going to create a two-way street as well as rapport and provide marketers with immediate, valuable data that can be used for further segmentation and targeting. When subscribers respond to a poll or survey, they are sending a message that indicates great engagement value. This means they appreciate the brand enough to want to voice their opinion.
More Segmentation Opportunities Other than Just Opens
When engagement data is available beyond tracking opens, marketers can accomplish higher levels of segmentation. They no longer need to segment because someone opened an email. They can segment based on what they’ve clicked on, how they’ve demoed features, what they’ve bought, what they’ve responded to, and how they’ve engaged with different types of content thus far. New segmentation possibilities make every message more timely, relevant, engaging, and suitable for expected actions.
Greater Email Personalization Based on Actual Engagement Metrics
Nothing would be more personalized than receiving an email acknowledging that you’ve engaged so frequently with a certain type of content and/or product. If someone is always responding, clicking, reading, and buying a certain type of product or service, it only makes sense to provide them with a recommendation for something similar or something they have not yet seen but that also corresponds. Real engagement metrics allow for greater personalization of emails, which makes email marketing an experience.
Constant Improvement Opportunities Through Testing Based on Real Engagements
There’s always room for improvement, and by continually testing and improving based on real engagements from your subscribers, you’ll keep your campaigns effective. For example, marketers can constantly A/B test subject lines and the body of the content or different design layouts and CTAs to see what’s clicked the most, what’s converted, and what’s had the most read time. Adjusting from systematic testing and effectiveness stemming from real engagements will ultimately allow marketers to improve and optimize the best possible campaigns over time for the best potential performance. This should also help long-term subscriber engagement.
Empowering Teams Through Real Engagement Training for Greater Success
One of the greatest advantages of using real engagements over opens is that training in-house teams for what they can and cannot learn from this data improves campaign execution from the start and enhances analysis afterward. Because these metrics rely less on assumptions and generalizations based on opens, trained professionals who understand how to decipher the comprehensive data about real engagements can utilize their findings to implement appropriate strategies and then adjust in a more proactive fashion. Ensuring teams understand how to use such metrics will give them the tools to create meaningful email marketing for improved relevance going forward.
Assessing the Value of Real Engagements to the Business Regularly
Finally, assess the value to your business of regular targeting based on real engagement metrics. For example, see how your customer lifetime value has increased from proper segmentation due to recurring activities (or inactivity). Have your retention rates improved? What’s your ROI? Internally knowing the advantages legitimizes a formula for how the appropriate communications can support your company’s growth, and notifying stakeholders of their needs and ensuing requirements to make real engagement targeting an affordable option for the long haul will assist with buy-in, too. For example, proper investment in segmentation strategies will only benefit further personalized efforts down the line.
Marketing Automation from Real Engagements
The ability to use real engagement metrics for marketing automation gives marketers a deeper understanding of where and when to send responses and faster based on what subscribers are already doing. For example, if someone clicked into an email but didn’t purchase or read the entire piece, marketing automation platforms could trigger a follow-up email on the same topic but with a summary or simpler CTA, sent as soon as the system recognizes customer activity. With the ability to integrate between the email platform and marketing automation for everything from clicks to reads to purchases, brands can ensure customers are getting what they need when they need it in context and the effectiveness of the overall customer journey increases with campaign success increased exponentially.
Using Engagement Metrics for Other Channels
Another way that real engagement metrics can improve the strategy of email marketing is when it comes to larger cross-channel strategies. If a brand understands how its emails are engaged (e.g., types of content opened more frequently, frequency of purchases inferred, etc.), it can change copy sent to customers elsewhere social media, digital advertising opportunities, and content marketing efforts. We’d want to use that information and help customers and let them have the same expectations and find value in experiences no matter how they see or interact with the brand, extending across multiple channels. When marketers keep brand messaging consistent across all platforms, it’s appreciated and deepens emotional attachment to the brand and how well they know their consumers.
Predictive Engagement from Analytics Over Time
One of the best elements about real engagement metrics is that they give marketers an edge over time. For example, through predictive analytics, past engagement metrics can determine which subscribers might be inclined to open their email or which topics they’ll gravitate toward based on past participation metrics. Was someone engaged with last year’s sale? Perhaps they’ll open an email about the same offer this year or at the very least respond to it if they get it. Knowing this in advance helps marketers get ahead of the game and ensure proper offering and personalization from the outset so that real engagement isn’t a surprise but a welcome offering that pleases subscribers even more, adding to overall marketing effectiveness and ROI exponentially.
Conclusion
Shifting the email marketing priority from open rates a somewhat arbitrary statistic to engagement means that now, marketers have a more tangible, sustainable way of accessing and understanding what a subscriber wants and needs. Open rates don’t do much for a marketer’s bottom line; it only shows that someone opened an email potentially by mistake and certainly without any interest. But engagement means clicking through, filling out a form, making a purchase, exploring, responding to questions, and actively selecting pieces of content.
Thus, when marketers compel interaction with their emails through engagement, they understand better what subscribers want and how they need to cater to them for appropriate targeting. Marketers who can acclimate to how users engage with their content whether they clicked on link A instead of link B, if they ended up purchasing product A after showing interest in product B, or if they responded to a survey rather than deleting the email can make far better segmentation decisions based on the access granted. Such tailored email experiences make campaign efforts successful because now, nuanced observations can convert more than generalized expectations.
In addition, email campaigns are assessed for performance in real time via engagement, making the information relevant and penetrative. Understanding how audiences engage with marketing allows merchants to readjust content after an exchange for greater effectiveness moving forward. This not only helps the next engagement opportunity but also sets up the marketer for success with any subsequent email communications or project endeavors down the line. This kind of social credit goes a long way because it develops trust over time leading to reputable rapport and collaborations.
Moreover, when subscribers consistently receive quality engagements, they are likely to become repeat customers because they appreciate the equity of what is offered. Therefore, engagement versus open rates as a new metric gives marketers a better position for successful long-term customer retention. Overall, genuine engagement breeds long-term success with email marketing efforts that leave people satisfied and transform them into reliable, lifetime valued customers due to the correct attention and purpose.